Oscar de la Renta / Spring 2013 RTW

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“What’s the mood?” queried Oscar de la Rentabackstage at his show, and laughed—“trying to make beautiful clothes!”

Oscar, of course, is not a designer who frets about arcane inspiration or agonizes over capturing the zeitgeist in cloth; he just makes beautiful clothes, beautifully, to make his pan-generational clients look and feel as good as they can. And that is no small feat.

This doesn’t mean that he didn’t hit the key trends of the season: the new mid-calf-length skirt, for instance, and some of the most ravishing lace pieces we’ve seen, including examples in thick cotton, tape-work, and an imaginative re-embroidery of dark ribbons in an abstract scribble motif. Amongst the airy ball gowns and sleek evening sheath dresses he showed a playful quartet of brilliant faille evening shorts—one with an ostrich-fronded peplum, another with a slash-neck top crusted with bright colored, shiny-petalled plastic gardenias.

True to his roots, this famed son of the Dominican Republic threw some Caribbean seasoning into the mix, with an upbeat palette of watermelon pink, sunshine yellow, and parrot green. These solids were mixed with vibrant Madras cotton plaids, slashed to ribbons to create multitiered pencil skirts.

Only Oscar can fashion the grandest evening statements and still make them seem featherlight and effortless to wear. There were stately solid-colored faille gowns with a Cristóbal Balenciaga flavor, dangling with the pampilles—little baubles wrapped in silk thread—of a toreador’s suit of lights, and silvery sheath dresses, including one pleated example that had a Fortuny (the designer who will be the centerpiece of an upcoming exhibition at the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute of which Oscar is Chairman) spirit to it.

And the finale of peacock-skirted ball gowns (high in front, sweeping to a wide train in back), bristling with pleated tulle or dusted with fragile embroidery, proved a master class in Oscar’s superb couture techniques, honed through the decades since his first adventures in fashion in the 1950s.